Why Should Delaware Care?
Only a handful of inpatient psychiatric facilities operate in Delaware, many of which are privately owned. Oversight for these facilities often falls to state and federal regulators, leaving patients and their families who are harmed by treatment with few options for accountability.
Tia Wright found her 22-year-old son, Darrian, in the emergency room on an early Saturday morning last year. Hours before he arrived at Christiana Hospital, he received a powerful sedative cocktail inside one of Delaware’s psychiatric facilities.
Darrian, who has an intellectual disability that limits his cognitive function, voluntarily admitted himself to the Rockford Center in Newark after telling his mother he wanted to die.
He woke up in the emergency room less than 48 hours later.
At the time of his admission to Rockford, Darrian weighed less than 115 pounds. And during his short stay, Darrian received multiple medications on top of a shot of Benadryl, Ativan, and Zyprexa, a potent combination meant to subdue patients during outbursts, his medical records show.
An independent psychiatrist who reviewed a redacted copy of Darrian’s medical records said he received a large amount of sedating medications when accounting for his body weight. The psychiatrist also said he would not have given such a powerful combination considering Darrian’s weight and the medications already in his system.
Once Darrian left the emergency room, his mother said he had side effects from the medications for weeks. Wright’s story mirrors that of another mother who claims Rockford overmedicated her then-8-year-old daughter, leading to hallucinations that told her to harm herself and others.
The accounts also come after state regulators documented the psychiatric hospital’s repeated violation of patient safety rules in 2022 and 2024. Rockford had regularly given children medications without their, or their parents’, consent, according to inspectors’ reports.
Additionally, two former employees who spoke with Spotlight Delaware said they believe de-escalation processes were not utilized enough in the facility.
The claims reveal a pattern of questionable, if not impermissible, druggings of vulnerable patients. And after turning to Rockford as one of the only care options of its kind in Delaware, patients and their families say they were left searching for recourse against a facility that did more to harm than help.
Recourse that they say has often proven hard to find.
Rockford CEO Bill Mason said in an email that his hospital cannot discuss patient care due to privacy laws, but that it prides itself on transparency and is committed to “high-quality, compassionate care.”
In another email, Mason “categorically” denied the hospital uses sedation as a first line of defense against patients.
Darrian returned to Rockford months later, after Wright said he wandered from home and was taken to a hospital, which later transported him to the facility. This second experience was not notable, she said.
Wright said she believes the facility was more careful with Darrian during his second stay, which lasted three days, because of her persistent calling during his first experience.
Still, Wright said she now places a note in Darrian’s bag advising anyone who may find him wandering in the future to not take him to Rockford.
Today, Wright said her son is more stable following a change in his medications. She has enrolled him in online school, and he does art classes. But she says he is stable because of her efforts, not because of outside help.
“It’s all me,” Wright said. “It’s not nothing that anybody else is doing.”
Threats of sedation
Early in the afternoon on March 21, 2025, Darrian received that subduing drug cocktail less than 24 hours after being voluntarily committed at Rockford.
Hours later, he arrived in the emergency room for “medication side effect,” according to medical records reviewed by Spotlight Delaware.
He reportedly received those medications following a spat of “aggression,” something his mother said she had never experienced. Instead, she said that if her son does have outbursts, it is because he is in pain.
“So you gave him all that medicine for what?” Wright said. “Because he was asking you questions? He was getting on your nerves?”
Yann Poncin, a psychiatrist who works with children at Yale Medicine, said combining medications can compound their effects.
Darrian had already received two doses of hydroxyzine, an anxiety medication, as well as a dose of Haldol, a powerful anti-psychotic, earlier in the day. He may not have been overly sedated at that point, but whatever drugs were still in his system, combined with the shot, may have over-sedated him, Poncin said.
“It’s a really large amount, and maybe risky in the context of the other things that he takes,” Poncin said. “And the way we know it was risky is because you saw the outcome.”
Darrian’s experience follows claims made by two other former Rockford patients who told Spotlight Delaware they experienced or witnessed staff threaten patients with sedation, when they otherwise would not have needed it.
Jessicalyn Van Lenten, from Bear, spent seven days in the facility in December 2025.
She said she saw staff instigating patients and questioned whether they are advised to practice other non-medication interventions first.
“They have no capacity to deal with people with mental health issues,” Van Lenten said.
During her stay, she said a staff member threatened her with sedation after she began raising concerns about her medication and other issues on her unit, like not being able to see the time.
‘It was easier to medicate’
Kate Lott, who worked in Rockford between 2024 and 2025, called her time in the facility “traumatizing.” She said she has worked in the behavioral health field for 26 years.
She said de-escalation was not promoted enough when dealing with patient outbursts, and the “first instinct” of support staff was to ask nurses to get sedation.
“It was easier to medicate than it was to de-escalate,” Lott said.
Demarco Delion said he worked at Rockford from 2022 to 2025 as a behavioral interventionist and trained new staff on de-escalation practices. But during his time in the facility, Delion said he was only called in to address outbursts after sedation had already been ordered.
He claimed he saw sedation used by staff in anger, rather than in attempts to help a patient.
“I witnessed a lot of it,” Delion said. “… Up to the point where it brought tears to my eyes.”
Mason, Rockford’s CEO, vehemently denied claims that his hospital relied on sedation as an initial de-escalation method.
“Rockford follows all appropriate de-escalation techniques with sedation only used pursuant to a physician’s order and when all other efforts have been exhausted,” he said in an email.
In September 2024, Delaware regulators with the state’s health department found something alarming during an unannounced inspection at Rockford.
In reviewing a sample of five patients’ records, they found that in all of them the psychiatric hospital gave the children psychotropic medications without their consent, or that of their parent’s, in violation of both state and federal regulations.
Asked about the state report, Mason called it an opportunity for “continuous improvement.” He said the hospital has put processes in place to address its protocols. He did not elaborate on what, specifically, those processes entail.
According to a correction plan submitted to the state in late 2024, Rockford said it would revise policies to require physicians to obtain and document consent for medications. It also would audit its own compliance for at least six months afterward.
Such internal audits had not substantially changed the outcomes at Rockford previously though.
In 2022, Delaware inspectors found the hospital violated the same consent regulations. The facility avoided meaningful consequences beyond submitting correction plans to the state by saying it would retrain its nurses.
Regulators also said in a prior report from October 2023 that facility employees did not document any kind of aggressive behavior for a patient but still administered sedation. The report said an employee told inspectors there was no evidence in the patient’s chart showing sedation was necessary.
Lott, who also served as the director of Kirkwood Recovery Center in Wilmington from 2017 to 2022, said she was told by regulators at that time that it was their job to keep centers open when they were found to be noncompliant.
“They needed us to be open, to care for all these people – the homeless, the drug addicts, the mentally ill,” Lott said. “They needed us.”
In a statement from the Delaware Department of Health and Social Services, which regulates hospitals, a spokesperson said the department cannot comment on specific allegations or personnel matters. He noted that all licensed facilities in the state are required to meet state and federal requirements regarding patient care.
“When deficiencies are identified, the Department takes appropriate enforcement action, which may include corrective action plans, sanctions, fines, or other remedies as warranted,” the spokesperson said.
Parents decry communication blackout
Soon after her daughter’s stay at the Rockford Center last summer, Julia Bailey started to lock her cabinets, stow away her knives, and use surveillance cameras in her home in an effort to keep her children safe.
Not from any outside intruder, but from the voices and scary figures that told her then-8-year-old daughter to harm herself and others. Voices her daughter began hearing and seeing shortly after her time at Rockford.
The New Jersey mother told Spotlight Delaware her daughter, Oaklynn, never experienced hallucinations prior to her stay at the psychiatric facility.
“She never saw anything, or even spoke about seeing things, before she went to Rockford,” Bailey said.
Both parents, Wright and Bailey, told Spotlight Delaware that getting in touch with the facility and their children was nearly impossible.
When Bailey brought her daughter to Rockford in July 2025 for what would become an 11-day stay, she went days at a time without hearing from the hospital, she said.
On the day after Oaklynn’s admission, Bailey tried to speak to her daughter three times, but she said hospital staff hung up on her each time.
A week into Oaklynn’s stay and overwhelmed with frustration over the lack of communication, she attempted to call the hospital 45 times. The staff declined each of those calls, she said.
“My kid is in your care, she’s 8, she’s a baby, and I have no information as to what’s going on,” Bailey said.
Mason, Rockford’s CEO, said families can reach a nursing supervisor at the facility “24 hours a day, 7 days a week.”
Wright, however, said her experience was not any better.
“You damn near gotta say you’re gonna burn the place down for somebody to call you back,” Wright said.
Hours after leaving her son, Wright said she received calls from Darrian saying he wanted to leave the facility.
She did not receive another update on her son, other than being told he was asleep, until Darrian’s father called Wright and told her their son had been admitted to the emergency department at Christiana Hospital.
Few avenues of recourse
Regulators have previously told Spotlight Delaware that closing facilities is often a last resort, and they give hospitals every chance to fix issues found by inspectors. In Delaware, where inpatient mental health providers are limited, a closure would hamstring an already stressed treatment system.
Typically, when hospitals are found in noncompliance, up to the point it poses “a serious threat to the health and safety of a patient,” state law says regulators can fine a hospital $10,000.
When the state decides to fine a hospital, it often amounts to nothing more than a slap on the wrist for institutions that often have multi-billion-dollar owners, like Rockford and nearby MeadowWood Behavioral Health Hospital.
Families and patients left in the aftermath of questionable treatment cannot always afford to sue a hospital, let alone withstand the years of litigation that comes with it. Such medical malpractice suits are also difficult to prove and, ultimately, to win, when a death or significant injury has not occurred.
So families often find themselves in the dark, clamoring for any kind of recourse.
Mason said the facility has a compliance hotline and that all claims are investigated. Additionally, he said families concerned about their children can reach out to the hospital, or speak to a patient advocate.
And late last year, the state fined Rockford $10,000 after it found unlocked doors between an adolescent and adult unit, posing a potential safety risk. But for a hospital owned by a company worth nearly $12 billion, the fine amounts to little.
Although her son is doing better, Wright says Darrian’s experience has left him unrecognizable to some family members.
Wright said she was unsure if Darrian would ever return to normal following his stay. But eventually, his side effects subsided. Still, she said her son is “different” since his time at Rockford.
“It’s like he went in for one thing,” she said, “and came out with 10 other things wrong.”